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Title: Trans-Imperial Anarchism
Author: Robert Kramm
Date: 06 May 2020
Language: en
Topics: Japan, Japanese anarchism, imperialism, Anti-imperialism
Source: *Modern Asian Studies*, Volume 55, Issue 2, March 2021, pp. 552–586. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X19000337

Robert Kramm

Trans-Imperial Anarchism

Abstract

This article investigates anarchist theory and practice in 1920s and

1930s imperial Japan. It deliberately focuses on concepts and

interventions by a rather unknown group—the Nōson Seinen Sha—to

highlight a global consciousness even among those anarchists in imperial

Japan who did not become famous for their cosmopolitan adventures. Their

trans-imperial anarchism emerged from a modern critique of the present

and engagement with cooperatist communalist ideas and experiences in

Asia, Russia, and Western Europe. Anarchists theorized and implemented

new forms of living that challenged the forces of capitalism,

imperialism, and increasing militarism. In doing so, they simultaneously

positioned themselves against established conservative and fascist

agrarianism as well as Marxist dogmatism in the socialist movement.

Despite their repression by the imperial state, they offered a radical,

universalist, yet pragmatic way of being in autarkic farming village

communes that corresponded with similar ideas and movements worldwide.

Introduction

Anarchism has been a global phenomenon. Anarchist theory and practice

have had the global aim of liberation, through overcoming capitalism and

state power as well as any other form of authority, hierarchy, and

exploitation. Its vision is to allow people to govern themselves

autonomously without coercion, based on individual freedom and mutually

shared interests. Most anarchists, anarchist thought, and anarchist

movements worldwide have been embedded within networks that cross

national, imperial, and regional borders, yet they have been

simultaneously intertwined with local and historically specific contacts

and contexts. For the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in

particular, Benedict Anderson has mapped ‘the gravitational force of

anarchism’,[1] demonstrating how dissidents at the margins of empire

appropriated and used the new, accelerated, and also accessible, means

of travelling and publishing for their revolutionary cause. Of course,

many anarchist projects in various regions of the world have been part

of a longer history of statelessness, undermining the hegemonic notion

of state administration as the only modern historic form.[2] For other

(mostly non-European) countries and colonies, at a time when the whole

world was affected by capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism,

anarchism evolved as a new and attractive political theory and practice

for anti-authoritarian and anti-colonial social movements. Studies on

the Indian anti-colonial Ghadar movement and networks in the Eastern

Mediterranean, for instance, have unearthed the global connections of

activist groups by tracking the trails of non-white radicals who

travelled the world in their anti-colonial struggle.[3] Worldwide

anarchism was grounded in anarchist networks that ‘comprised of formal

and informal structures, […] facilitated doctrinal diffusion, financial

flows, transmission of information and symbolic practices, and acts of

solidarity’, as Lucien van der Walt and Steven Hirsch have convincingly

argued.[4] Despite local variations, anarchist theory and practice were

undeniably significant and globally connected—in Asia and beyond.[5]

In the case of imperial Japan, despite prevailing stereotypes of the

alleged obedience of the Japanese people, scholars have also highlighted

Japan’s rich tradition of anarchism. Arguably the most prominent

Japanese anarchists, Kōtoku Shūsui (1871–1911) and Ōsugi Sakae

(1885–1923) elaborated highly sophisticated analyses and critiques of

capitalism and imperialism; in doing so, they looked beyond Japan with a

global vision and integrated the Japanese empire into the world

system.[6] Classical studies have debated to what extent their critique

was grounded in their experiences abroad, underscoring, for instance,

how Kōtoku, Ōsugi, and other anarchists were influenced by ideas such as

Christian socialism and how much they contributed to anarchist theory

and practice in Japan.[7] More recent scholarship highlights border-

crossing networks that operated in multiple directions, with sometimes

contingent circumstances that contributed significantly to the

development of anarchism in East Asia. By exploring the routes of

anarchist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956), Nadine Willems has shown that

highly mobile individuals built networks that shaped ‘ideas of social

change’ by crossing imperial Japan’s borders.[8] Studies focusing on

Korean and Chinese students who received their education in Japan and

returned to Korea and China similarly underscore the building of

anarchist networks beyond the borders of imperial Japan and throughout

East Asia.[9] Indeed, studies on anarchist movements in Japan and other

parts of the world have demonstrated that the mobility and contacts of

anarchist and other radical activists in transnational networks—whether

in the form of study groups, labour unions, and publishing

collectives—facilitated the impact of the movement.[10]

Although this article builds on these insights, it explores the global

or, more precisely, the trans-imperial connectedness of anarchism in

imperial Japan from a different angle. It analyses a set of writings

from an anarchist communist group called Nōson Seinen Sha (Farming

Village Youth Association) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The Nōson

Seinen Sha was a rather small and socially diverse group of anarchists.

Its most prominent members were probably Miyazaki Akira (1900–1977) and

Suzuki Yasuyuki (1903–1970). The group aimed at building a libertarian

society by establishing autarkic, cooperatist, communalist farming

villages that were independent of state power, the capitalist market,

and imperialist expansion. It started its project on the outskirts of

Nagano prefecture in 1931. This article deliberately focuses on one such

local group to underscore the global dimension of imperial Japan’s

anarchist thought, even among those proponents who did not become famous

for their extensive cosmopolitan adventures. It uses trans-imperialism

as a perspective that acknowledges the early twentieth century as a

historical moment when, in Japan as elsewhere, empires—and not the

nation-state—were the predominant framework of socio-political

organization.[11] Even fascism, arguably the most nationalistic

contemporary global current, which is usually perceived as being solely

preoccupied with centring itself in the world, ‘subsumed imperialism …

and took over processes and institutions that originated outside, or

prior to, its own historical moment’.[12] As Jane Burbank and Frederick

Cooper have put it, ‘empires and their interactions shaped the context

in which people gauged their political possibilities, pursued their

ambitions, and envisioned their societies’.[13] That said, despite the

multiple forms of systematic exploitation, discrimination, and violence

inherent to them, empires were also framing the channels of

communication and room-to-manoeuvre of its dissidents. Trans-imperial

anarchism acknowledges this historical moment and indicates that

anarchists’ struggle against state authority targeted an imperial state,

which they wanted to overcome. Their vision of liberation and solidarity

with oppressed people was global and reached beyond Japan’s imperial

boundaries into other imperial formations. Moreover, Japanese anarchists

experienced peculiar circumstances: they were confronted with a

repressive authoritarian regime, but also found themselves in a ‘double

bind’ situation in which they were simultaneously subjugated to Western

hegemony yet were themselves positioned within a non-white imperial

centre.[14] Imperial Japan’s anarchists’ radical analysis, critique, and

solutions to their immediate historical situation; the tension between

the West and non-West that emerged in Japanese anarchists’ critical

reading of revolutionary theory; as well as their appreciation and

discussion of non-Western cooperatist communalist concepts are at the

centre of this article. Trans-imperial anarchism thus means anarchists

fighting to overthrow imperial state authority as well as crossing

imperial borders by reading, criticizing, and speaking about anarchist

theory and practice in imperial formations outside the Japanese empire,

while simultaneously navigating within and beyond the imperial

boundaries of their own historical moment and position.

The article begins by placing the Nōson Seinen Sha within Japan’s

anarchist movement and introduces the group’s understanding of

cooperatist communalism and its vision of a better future. The next

section integrates the Nōson Seinen Sha into the historical context of

early twentieth-century imperial Japan’s agrarianist discourse. Along

with the writings of the Nōson Seinen Sha, the article illustrates the

group’s radical criticism and concepts of cooperatist communalism, which

includes underscoring its embrace of science, such as an anarchist

reading of evolutionary theory and social organization as the basis for

its analysis and critique. This demonstrates that anarchism,

all-too-often disqualified as being primitive, anti-modern, irrational,

and anti-science, could very well be grounded in scientific reasoning

and develop a concise revolutionary theory and practice.[15] Finally,

the article puts imperial Japanese anarchist thought around cooperatist

communalism into conversation with radical utopian community projects in

other imperial settings in Asia. Unfortunately, farmers’ responses to

the Nōson Seinen Sha’s engagement are not documented and thus their

voices are silent in this article.[16] Yet the Nōson Seinen Sha’s texts

stress the trans-imperial, indeed global, scope of its theory and

practice. Its analysis of the historical moment and its own position,

its acknowledgement of revolutionary movements and thought worldwide,

and its contribution to a global struggle all developed within a ‘global

consciousness’. Such consciousness, as Sebastian Conrad and Dominik

Sachsenmaier have argued, was fostered by educated metropolitan elites

initiating global channels of communication in the late nineteenth

century. The circulation of knowledge through newspapers and journals,

for instance, constituted a new way of perceiving the world. This does

not necessarily mean that every reported event was of global importance,

but that a global consciousness ‘affected a general mentality’, which

‘also framed the context in which specific political measures were

discussed’.[17] Half a century later, this also applied to Japanese

anarchist circles. Cooperatist communalist thought and practice in

imperial Japan resonated with similar global ideas and movements,

ranging from anarchist communes to intentional communities, vegetarian

colonies, and socialist kibbutzim.[18] This was not a coincidence. The

members of the Nōson Seinen Sha were well aware of what was going on in

the world and were not passive recipients of a trans-imperial flow of

knowledge. Rather, they selectively appropriated and commented on this

knowledge, and used it to their own ends, confident of the significance

of their contribution to a global struggle for liberation.

Anarchism, cooperatist communalism, and the emergence of the Nōson

Seinen Sha

Forming a prominent movement in the early twentieth century, Japanese

anarchists were important mediators of knowledge and contributed

tremendously to the intellectual environment in imperial Japan.

Anarchist thought was widely circulated in numerous radical newspapers

and journals, such as the Heimin Shinbun and Kindai Shisō, but also

through translations of literary and scientific works.[19] State

authorities were eager not to miss any opportunity to repress the

distribution of anarchist knowledge by shutting down newspapers and

repeatedly harassing and arresting its editors.[20] In particular, in

the wake of the Public Security Preservation Law of 1925, state

repression severely weakened Japan’s anarchist movement.[21]

Nevertheless, Japanese anarchists were able to maintain publication

collectives, study groups, and activist associations. Between the 1900s

and 1930s, various anarchist individuals and groups within the very

heterogenous anarchist movement developed their own strategies of

dodging, undermining, and overcoming state repression and authority.

Anarchist terrorism and anarchist syndicalism were two distinctive

strands of the movement that were eager to bring about instant social

revolution. The Girochinsha (Guillotine Society) was probably the most

prominent group promoting anarchist terror, through the bombing of

symbols and killing of members of the imperial state. Its attempts at

attacking the system, however, were unsuccessful, particularly in face

of the sheer superior force of imperial Japan’s police and military.[22]

Its members Furuta Daijirō and Nakahama Testu, for example, were hanged

for their intention to and preparations made to assassinate then Crown

Prince Hirohito in the early 1920s.[23] Syndicalism, which focused on

union building and a general strike of the organized labour force in

Japan’s emerging industrial sector, had appealed to workers since

Japan’s early industrialization in the late nineteenth century and had

become much more popular.[24] Its popularity also derived from the fact

that solidarity with the growing number of industrial workers promised

protection for the anarchist movement and created an awareness of

collective strength. Moreover, anarchist-syndicalists believed that

mobilizing the industrial masses would bring political leverage, because

workers’ strikes and sabotage taking place in factories affected the

industrial sector, which was ‘vital to the state’s military and economic

ambitions’.[25]

Anarchist communists, a third strand of anarchism in imperial Japan,

among whom the Nōson Seinen Sha was numbered, particularly opposed

anarchist syndicalism. They argued that syndicalism—as well as

political-party building and parliamentarianism—would eventually produce

new hierarchies. Moreover, they also believed that syndicalism was

preoccupied with the life worlds of workers in imperial Japan’s

industrial and urban centres, and ignored the majority of people who

were still subsisting on farms in the countryside. Anarchist communists,

also referred to as ‘pure anarchists’, propagated cooperatist

communalism and proposed a much more fundamental break with the remains

of feudalism in the agrarian sector. This would also undermine

capitalist modes of production by establishing cooperative farming

within a libertarian society.[26] Based on the conviction that the

countryside was the main arena of social revolution, anarchists such as

Ishikawa Sanshirō, and also the Nōson Seinen Sha, articulated very

progressive notions of human existence, interaction, and organization

that would evolve in anarchist farming communes.[27]

Anarchist communist theory and practice were grounded in cooperatist

communalism. In the American context, Murray Bookchin has commented

extensively on communalism’s aim to conceptualize a libertarian,

federalist system of autonomously organized municipalities that allow

people a self-determined life. Communalism, a term originating from the

Paris Commune of 1871, ‘does not focus [on] the factory as its principle

social arena or on the industrial proletariat as its main historical

agent; and it does not reduce the free community of the future to a

fanciful medieval village’.[28] Rather, communalism circumscribes a

democratic organization, often in form of farming villages and

cooperatist workshops, that is not interested in political and economic

structures alone, but equally aims at cultural production and social

relations ‘according to the cannons of reason, reflection, and discourse

that uniquely belong to our species’.[29] Cooperation (that is, human

beings assisting each other) is a key characteristic of communalism and

implies the necessity of practice and human agency.

In imperial Japan, cooperatist communalism incorporated anarchist

communists and their conception of voluntary cooperative associations in

communal village projects that would challenge established forms of

exploitation and oppression. Anarchist communists such as the Nōson

Seinen Sha referred to farming villages as nōson, quite similarly to

other contemporary critics of capitalism, industrialization, and

urbanization from different political strands. Yet they clearly

distanced themselves from conservative and fascist notions of

countryside farming life as well as from anarcho-syndicalism’s focus on

industrial labour, criticizing them for the exploitation of both farmers

and the countryside for the benefit of the industrializing urban

centres. They conceived of cooperatively owned farming villages, shared

means of production, and autarky as initiating a communal life in the

museifu konmyun (anarchist commune), which they considered the

fundamental basis on which to build a communal, cooperative society

(kyōdō shakai). Mutual aid (sōgo fujo), in Peter Kropotkin’s sense,

Japanese anarchists argued, was the overarching force that would tie

communal life together. Hence, cooperatist communalism was more than a

cooperative farming association as it aimed at a holistic way of being

so as to improve not only economic, but also all political, social, and

cultural relations. The social organization of cooperatist communalist

farming villages, anarchist communists of the Nōson Seinen Sha claimed,

would envision ‘for the first time the birth of the possibility of a

true anarchist revolution’.[30]

The Nōson Seinen Sha was a group of anarchists that was particularly

prominent in promoting and practising cooperatist communalist strategies

in imperial Japan. The group consisted of about 23 members, with maybe

several hundred supporting farmers in the countryside. Although the

group appears to have been rather male-dominated, in terms of class

background it was quite diverse. For instance, the group’s two most

prolific theorists Miyazaki Akira and Suzuki Yasuyuki had very different

careers. Miyazaki Akira was born in 1900 in Okayama but grew up in an

industrial mining area in Fukuoka prefecture in northern Kyushu. After

junior high school, around the time of the Russian Revolution, he

started working in the railway industry. He supposedly encountered

anarchist ideas during a trip to Hokkaido and through his contacts in a

Nihon University student settlement in Tokyo. He read Russian novelists,

while pursuing engineering studies at a college in Shanghai. Positioned

outside the privileged realms of academia and without a rich family

background, working-class Miyazaki was indeed an anarchist from below.

His comrade Suzuki Yasuyuki, on the contrary, grew up in typical

intellectual circles, as did many contemporary revolutionary theorists

and agitators. Suzuki was born in what is today Kitaibaraki, Ibaraki

prefecture, in 1903, and went to school in Kamakura, where he became

fascinated with Ōsugi Sakae’s interpretations of Christian socialism. In

1925, he entered Waseda University’s Department of Law and very soon

thereafter started publishing on anarchist thought. Hence, as these

short biographical vignettes elucidate, not only did the Nōson Seinen

Sha’s anarchist ideas not evolve in a singular genealogy, with a fixed

set of theoretical ideas, but the group’s members also came from varied

backgrounds. Very few of them were actual academics who had the

privilege of studying at a university, but all of them were

intellectually engaged and participated in anarchist study groups,

formed independent publishing collectives, or worked for local

newspapers. Texts like Miyazaki’s 1930 ‘Appeal to the Farmers’ (Nōmin ni

yobu) attracted academic members, such as Tashiro Gisaburō (1907–1967),

and convinced them to join the Nōson Seinen Sha’s cause. While most

members met through anarchist group activities, some of their bonds were

also tightened by the shared experience of getting arrested by the

police and spending time together in prison.

Together with Yagi Akiko (1895–1983), Hoshino Junji (1906–1996), and

Mochizuki Jirō (1912–1937), Miyazaki and Suzuki founded the Nōson Seinen

Sha in February 1931 and started their own communal experiment in the

hinterland of Nagano prefecture. In anticipation of unrest among farmers

and an uprising, the group planned to attack the military in Nagano, but

this never transpired. A series of robberies in the area, which was

meant to undermine the system of capitalist property and to financially

support both the commune and the foreseen uprising, only resulted in the

imprisonment of some of the group’s members in 1932.[31] Due to economic

hardship and harsh state repression, by September 1932 the communal

project had already dissolved. Despite its short-lived and small-scale

presence, the Nōson Seinen Sha’s ideas were nevertheless important as

they highlight the significance of anarchist interventions and

alternative visions of a better society offered by anarchism. Members of

the group did not throw bombs, but they refused to pay taxes and

developed a highly sophisticated critique of capitalism as well as of

the contemporary socialist movement. In its one year of existence as a

practising cooperatist communalist group, the Nōson Seinen Sha struggled

against expanding industrialization at a time when major Japanese cities

were becoming increasingly turbulent places of ‘imperial democracy’,

with mass protests, an emerging labour movement, union building, and

widespread socialist ideas.[32] Thus, the Nōson Seinen Sha anarchists

also struggled against persistent Marxist dogmatism in the socialist

movement, which is particularly visible in Miyazaki Akira’s and Suzuki

Yasuyuki’s writings, and they developed ideals of cooperatist

communalism in anarchist communist fashion. The group was not aiming to

mobilize the masses (taishū) as were the socialists. Rather, it had a

much more grassroots, democratic, and individualistic sense of the

people (minshū) and of peoples’ ability to organize freely in temporary,

task-oriented associations of interest groups. In this regard, the group

became particularly influential for theorizing and implementing

self-sustained communes as well as propagating cooperative ownership,

the elimination of hierarchies, and the evolvement of democratic

models.[33] In doing so, the Nōson Seinen Sha was embedded within a

broader agrarianist discourse in imperial Japan; yet agrarian

anarchism’s cooperatist communalist theory and practice, as the

following section demonstrates, departed from other agrarianist

positions and criticism by fundamentally challenging imperial Japan’s

feudalist system and agricultural production.

Anarchism and agrarianism in imperial Japan

During the 1930s, agents of the Japanese imperial state aggressively

campaigned against any activity that disturbed public peace (chian),

especially accusing left-wing activists of espionage and sabotage

against Japan’s nation- and empire-building. Among the state’s prime

targets were anarchist groups, some of whom tried to dodge state

repression by moving to the countryside to establish cooperatist,

self-sustaining communes—‘keeping the state at a distance’, to use James

Scott’s words.[34] Several waves of repressions against anarchists

during the first half of the twentieth century had hit the movement

severely. They peaked with the High Treason Incident in 1910/11, the

hunt by the military and police for and assassination of activists and

critics following the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923, and the rise of

militarism and fascism after the Manchurian Incident in 1931. Moving to

the countryside to stay out of the sight and reach of police persecution

was but one strategy used by anarchists to survive individually and to

maintain the continuity of the anarchist movement.[35]

Yet the anarchists’ rural retreat involved more than just hiding in the

woods from the agents of the imperial state. Anarchist theory and

practice had elaborated on countryside life and agricultural production

in various, highly sophisticated ways since the early twentieth century.

And for good reason because, despite the increase and expansion of

industrialization and urbanization in the early twentieth century,

agriculture, which was based on tenant farming labour, remained a vital

part of imperial Japan’s economy.[36] A domestic crisis in agriculture,

as shown by the 1918 rice riots, could affect the whole empire, and vice

versa. Within Japan, tenant farmers were dependent on highly

influential, mostly absent, landowning elites, who often lived in

Japan’s expanding cities. The imperial state tried to support tenant

farmers, but programmes intended to help them to buy land failed due to

shortcomings in state funding. And although state officials were eager

to maintain small-scale farms because they supposedly personified

traditional Japanese virtues, their lack of control on the ground opened

a power vacuum that was, once again, filled by landlord elites.[37] In

the 1930s, farmers also struggled with falling prices for agricultural

products following inflation in the aftermath of the First World War,

increasing imports from Japan’s colonies Taiwan and Korea, and global

market effects in the era of the Great Depression.[38] Subsequent to the

Manchurian Incident and in order to cope with the social crisis of

impoverished farmers, the Japanese imperial state even initiated mass

mobilization campaigns that propagated and supported resettlement of

Japanese farmers in the allegedly empty Northeast Asia, which seemed to

offer promising opportunities.[39] That said, anarchist communism, which

conceptualized the ideal of self-sustaining, hierarchy-free communes

unaffected by domestic power structures as well as global capitalism,

thus seems to have directly spoken to the needs of many Japanese people

still living and working in the countryside.[40]

In the early twentieth century, with the expansion of capitalism,

industrialization, and urbanization, a new discourse evolved from the

fantasies of modern life. In imperial Japan, as elsewhere, as Harry

Harootunian has persuasively demonstrated, everyday experience became a

coeval, key aspect of intellectual engagement with the global historical

moment.[41] The emergence of mass culture, many contemporary critics

argued, would erode community, particularly in the countryside—and with

it, cultural authenticity allegedly attached to communal village life.

Some of Japan’s anarchists shared the belief in the eroding forces of

capitalism on the village community. Yet, their appeal to rural communal

life should not be misconstrued as nostalgia for a harmonious

countryside lifestyle. In 1910, Akaba Hajime (1875–1912), who became

famous for his anti-war activism, had already grasped the revolutionary

dimension of cooperatist communalism in rural village life, which he

outlined in a pamphlet titled ‘The Farmers’ Gospel’ (Nōmin no fukuin),

indicating his former affection for Christian socialism. Connecting

older forms of Japan’s village communities with Peter Kropotkin’s idea

of mutual aid, Akaba envisioned a ‘pure anarchist land’ that was not a

simple return to an imagined, untouched past, but one that would bring

‘advanced scientific knowledge and mutual aid in harmony’ to Japan’s old

village forms.[42] Anarchists like Akaba, as Sho Konishi has argued,

‘gave progressive meaning to the everyday cooperative practices of

ordinary farmers. They identified “cooperative living”… as the means to

achieve progressive, democratic and less hierarchical society on a

global scale.’[43] For these anarchists, the rural village was not a

mere retreat or sanctum from the forces of global capitalism, but the

very locale of everyday experience and modern life.

Of course, anarchists were among a wider and heterogeneous group that

fantasized about agrarian country life. Since the Meiji Restoration in

1868, an agrarianist discourse grew up in parallel with Japan’s

modernization project, which peaked in the pre-war period in the

1930s.[44] Dominant agrarianism (nōhonshugi), to quote Thomas Havens,

‘included a faith in agricultural economics, an affirmation of rural

communalism, and a conviction that farming was indispensable to those

qualities that made the nation unique’.[45] Agrarianist elite

conservatives criticized industrialism—but not capitalism itself—as an

aberration that weakened agriculture, forcing farmers into the factories

and creating a gap between the rich urban centres and poor rural

peripheries. They imagined agriculture and rural farming communities as

the nation’s backbone, feeding its population, supplying healthy

citizens for its military, and guaranteeing stability and security in

the overall aim of achieving wealth and national strength. Agrarianism

became increasingly popular in the first half of the twentieth century

and attracted folklorists like Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962) to represent

the farming village as the last bastion of Japan’s timeless cultural

essence, in contrast to modern life which was associated with urban

centres.[46] During the agricultural crisis of the late 1920s and early

1930s, fascist agrarianists (nōhonshugisha) such as Tachibana Kōzaburō

(1893–1974) repopularized the imagined purity of communal,

self-sustaining farming life. They rejected existing feudal structures

and encouraged cooperative villages as the foundation of a social order

that would tie farmers together materially and spiritually. Their ideas

entailed a limited critique of capitalism as a destructive force that

undermined a harmonious and ‘natural’ country life. Yet, like its

conservative predecessor, fascist agrarianism also clung to private

property and favoured patriarchal gender hierarchies in imperial Japan’s

family system.[47]

Anarchists’ promotion of cooperatist communalism was embedded within an

established agrarianist discourse from a broad political spectrum in

imperial Japan that articulated a critique against modernity. However,

anarchist theory and practice departed from conservative, folklorist,

and fascist agrarianism in crucial ways. Private property and the

division of labour in capitalist modes of production, as well as

patriarchy and class divisions, were forms of power that anarchists

attempted to destroy and overcome. They also did not intend to invert

the hierarchy between cities and villages, as some agrarianists had

proposed, but to abandon any sort of hierarchy altogether.[48] Moreover,

anarchists developed revolutionary notions of nature, the environment,

and thus, ultimately, human existence that were much more progressive

and scientifically based than conservative and fascist conceptions of

nature and the countryside. Sho Konishi has demonstrated that Japanese

anarchists increasingly turned to science after the Russo-Japanese War

(1904/05). Their eclectic reading of Russian and French evolutionary

theory, microbiology, and cosmology, all of which dealt with mutual aid

among prehistoric humans and animals, symbiotic microbe organisms, and a

decentred universe, were key references in their attempt to

scientifically prove anarchists’ conceptualization of cooperatist

communalism without the need for hierarchy and (state) authority in

social organization. Based on scientific knowledge, anarchists

considered cooperation and mutual aid—as opposed to exploitation and

competition—to be the engines of a distinctive, modern temporality in

historical progress and civilization.[49]

Agrarian anarchist Ishikawa Sanshirō, for instance, embedded human

existence in a constant negotiation with nature. He argued that

contemporary capitalist industrial production and urban life would

inevitably be intertwined with exploitation, inequality, and

unhealthiness, and was therefore unnatural. Instead, his understanding

of social organization as ‘a vast, horizontal collection of interacting

parts with no centre that came together to foster (agricultural)

production’ led him to plead for a healthy life in accordance with

nature.[50] This constant dynamic would prevent the establishment of

hierarchies and allow individuals the freedom to express themselves.

Referring to ancient Greek and Edward Carpenter, Ishikawa even redefined

democracy, claiming that the original meaning of demos would encompass

not only the common people, but also a people attached to the soil or

earth (do). He translated ‘democracy’ into Japanese as domin kurashi,

coining a term that sounds like democracy and simultaneously signifies

‘the life of a people attached to the earth’. This attachment, according

to Ishikawa, would enable people to realize their individual nature or

virtue through hard yet non-exploitive work that ultimately makes

freedom possible.[51]

The anarchist communists of the Nōson Seinen Sha shared a belief in the

strength of cooperative farming villages to act as a bulwark against the

forces of global capitalism, and conceptualized the organization as a

powerful revolutionary strategy that was more than just a naive dream of

liberty. And they closed the gap between the various forms of

libertarianism, agrarianism, and communalism prevalent in 1920s imperial

Japan.[52] Despite a nativist, back-to-nature appeal—which on first

sight appears as a narrow-minded glorification of a premodern

countryside lifestyle—the Nōson Seinen Sha was actually a globally

conscious, progressive group. Similarly to its predecessors and

contemporary comrades, it participated in the exchange and appropriation

of ideas and practices from various strands of radical thought from all

around the world. As Sho Konishi has shown in a case study of the

Arishima Farm in Hokkaido in the 1920s, anarchists in Japan considered

their cooperatist communes to be part of a globally synchronic endeavour

for the improvement of human life all over the world.[53] In a similar

vein, the Nōson Seinen Sha conceptualized a progressive form of

cooperatist being and offered an agrarianist model that was distinct

from its conservative, folklorist, and fascist counterparts. It promoted

cooperative work without the aim of profit and private property, and

engaged in theoretical debates with the currents of anarchist theory and

its Western epistemological hegemony. Its vision of an anarchist

modernity, as this article will discuss in more detail in the following

sections, was for a hierarchy-free social organization without state

authority, on autarkic but collaborating farming communes. And they put

their vision into practice by building a net of communes in Nagano

prefecture in 1931.

Anarchist theory and practice: appealing to farmers and

decentralizing the anarchist movement

‘The voice of the farming villages’ poverty has indeed been around for a

long time. Among all people there is no one who has not heard it.’ Yet,

‘nobody else but the farmers themselves can rescue the farming village’

wrote Miyazaki Akira in his introduction to ‘Appeal to the Farmers’

(Nōmin ni yobu).[54] Written in 1930 under the pen name Soeta Susumu, it

was published in the first issue of the anarchist journal Kurohata

(Black Flag). The piece was later republished as a pamphlet and became

the theoretical foundation of the Nōson Seinen Sha. It offered a

practical revolutionary approach and embedded cooperatist communalism

within a profound critique of global capitalism and its regional forms

and political systems.

In writings such as ‘Appeal to the Farmers’, Miyazaki held up the

farming village as the key site for social revolution. The three main

tasks, he argued, were to live in an autarky, to possess only shared

property, and to establish communal welfare based on mutual aid. As the

title indicates, the pamphlet was meant to appeal especially to farmers:

‘the liberation of the farming village must come at the hands of the

farmers’, who, Miyazaki claimed, would know their own needs best (jibun

jishin). Thus, farmers should not believe in the lie of peasants’ lawful

liberation from above after the supposed end of the feudal system.

Moreover, they should never accept help from the bourgeoisie. The

cooperative production and consumption of food and other necessities by

farmers would undermine the hegemony of the ruling class (shihai

gaikyū); the creation of self-sustaining communes was therefore

fundamental for liberation. Anarchist communism was thus no longer a

future goal, as Miyazaki considered that farmers organizing anarchist

communes and putting cooperatist communalist visions into practice would

cause an instant social revolution.

The first step towards accomplishing cooperatist communalism, according

to the Nōson Seinen Sha, was to understand that the communal life in

farming villages was the only possible way of life. Famers’ products,

Miyazaki believed, were supposed to meet the producers’ own needs only.

This would be a universal law, as entering the capitalist market by

exchanging agricultural goods for money would inevitably ruin village

life (seikatsu no reiraku). Thus, Miyazaki asked, ‘How can village life

stand on its own feet without selling rice, vegetables and subsidiary

products, and without any money?’ His logical conclusion was that for a

village to achieve absolute independence, free of money and market

forces, it needed to become self-sufficient (jikyū jisoku): ‘Is

facilitating the autarky of the farming village producing food from the

soil not the most important issue?’[55] This rhetoric was obviously

embedded in inter-war Japan’s agrarian discourse. Miyazaki’s strong

emphasis on rice as the pivotal agricultural product perpetuated a

culturalist sentiment for Japanese nationalist exceptionalism, and its

metaphorical use seems to be similar to imperial Japan’s nationalist

agrarianism.[56] Yet, it is remarkable how Miyazaki departed from

nationalist and spiritualist readings of the countryside and

agricultural production in his emphasis on the universal materiality of

the human body at the heart of agricultural labour. Of course, there is

an amount of vague spirituality in Miyazaki’s assertion that eating

something different from what you produce by yourself makes life

incomplete (fukanzen), leaving the exact meaning of incompleteness up to

the reader’s imagination. Unlike other agrarianists, however, Miyazaki

was not arguing for a spiritual basis to products such as rice to

connect humans, soil, and their ancestors. The production of food—rice

in this case—instead signifies an existential human need that must be

satisfied. The soil or earth nevertheless played a pivotal role in this

task, which becomes particularly visible in the trope of the ‘farming

village producing food from the earth’ (tabemono wo do kara tsukuri

nōson). According to Miyazaki, the connection between earth and humans

was purely materialistic, and its harmony manifested in the reciprocity

of human labour cultivating the earth, which in turn provides crops and

harvest for human existence. This universal materialistic law of a

reciprocal, harmonious relationship between nature and humans,

maintained through earth’s matter and energy as well as human agency,

would be the foundation for social mechanisms. In line with the argument

formulated by the English anarchist George Barrett, the production of

and access to food—‘the individual struggle to live, in its most simple

and elementary form’—results in society and lies at the heart of social

organization.[57] Self-sufficient manual farming labour, Miyazaki was

convinced, would take control of fundamental social mechanisms. It would

overcome capitalist modes of production, ownership, and authority, which

ultimately would allow free individuals to associate and was thus the

most promising strategy to achieving liberation.[58]

Organizing villages along self-sufficient lines of production indeed had

revolutionary potential. The emphasis on self-sufficiency through mutual

aid was supposed to undermine state authority, the capitalist division

of labour, and the exploitation of people and nature. Similarly to Akaba

Hajime, Miyazaki also imagined that imperial Japan’s cooperatist

communities would be built on land ‘that farmers are supposed to use

freely’, and that mutual aid would be combined with advanced

technologies to achieve self-sufficiency as opposed to profit.[59] A key

concern was money, which enabled exploitation through profit and

division of labour, and was therefore considered a force that eroded

solidarity. Miyazaki wrote, ‘With the birth of money in society

happiness vanishes’, arguing that money divides people, humans and their

products, farmers and workers, cities and countryside. Self-sufficient

farming within the village community and shared property would curb the

threat of money and prevent the establishment of hierarchies.[60]

When it comes to the issue of tax payments (nōzei), in particular,

anarchists’ vision of self-sufficient villages and rejection of money

directly attacked the state’s authority. As Miyazaki explained, modern

state institutions’ demand for tax payments from farmers was only

possible through the production of revenue gained by selling

agricultural products to the market in exchange for money. Tax revenues,

in turn, are crucial to the survival of state authorities, as they pay

for the state’s administration, police, and military. Therefore,

Miyazaki polemicized, the paying of tax ‘covers the pension of the

government’s bureaucrats, soldiers and police officers who have looked

down on the people with arrogance’. Moreover, tax payments would only

help capitalists to make profit. As they support state institutions and

authority, and sustain capitalist modes of production, they therefore

entail exploitation. Instead, the people could provide all the alleged

benefits of tax payments themselves. Following on from his initial

remarks, Miyazaki argued that all matters of village life, such as

‘putting up bridges, building roads, setting up irrigation for

uncultivated land, building storehouses and communal manufactories’,

could be solved by village people themselves: ‘When everything is done

by the village cooperation, there is no basis for government’s theft of

tax money.’[61] Whereas other agrarianists had argued for

self-sufficiency and a reduction in taxes so as not to support a corrupt

government and what they called a ‘diseased’, ‘unnatural’, and allegedly

‘un-Japanese’ urban industry with its ruling elites, the cooperatist

communalist anarchists of the Nōson Seinen Sha developed a much stronger

anti-state and anti-nationalist strategy. Refusing to pay tax was a

radical rejection of the imperial state and its projects, and a clear

statement against the landowning and capitalist elites.

Money and tax payments were also directly linked to issues of security

and war. Japan’s elites, according to Miyazaki, wanted people to believe

that all citizens’ support for the state, economy, and military in a

collaborating society (kyōdō shakai) generated national unity and

strength, to everyone’s benefit. On the contrary, Miyazaki argued, the

government’s call for unity and security, a call amplified by the

demands of ‘bureaucrats, police officers and bourgeois educators’ to

honour the nation, would only be a distraction. The nation, national

unity, strength, and security in a collaborating society of and for all

people were mere constructions of the ruling class. The imperial state,

its agents, and the bourgeoisie would be the only ones profiting from

the people’s labour and tax payments. Moreover, Miyazaki considered

money, taxes, and capitalism to be the foundation for war preparation as

modern industrial production was indispensable for modern war and,

arguably, vice versa. And the defence of the collaborating society

(kyōdō shakai no bōkyo) that the aura of war, as well as warfare itself,

was necessary to secure the nation’s wealth and strength against foreign

threats for the benefit for all citizens would, in fact, only serve the

ruling class.[62]

Miyazaki’s line of argument was obviously a direct critique of imperial

Japan’s nationalism, industrial expansion, and rising militarism in the

inter-war period. The anarchists’ intervention was indeed much more

radical than other groups’ agrarianist promotion of self-sufficient

countryside life organized in farming villages. Self-organizing farmers

without internal or external authority who rejected paying taxes clearly

undermined capitalist modes of production and imperial Japan’s

modernization project which was heavily focused on industrialization and

urbanization. Yet the Nōson Seinen Sha envisioned that farmers could,

and should, liberate themselves. Ironically, however, the voices of the

farmers themselves can hardly be heard in Miyazaki’s writings. The

essay’s title—‘Appeal to Farmers’—already indicates that Miyazaki

ultimately spoke to the farmers and in favour of them, and not with

them—and definitely never let the farmers speak for themselves. Indeed,

his appeal might have attracted other anarchist intellectuals rather

than the subaltern tenant farmers in the countryside. Gayatri Spivak,

among others, has called attention to the inherent epistemic violence in

the desire of intellectuals to represent subaltern people of colour.[63]

Miyazaki, too, repeated the mechanism of epistemic violence to a certain

extent: he fell into the trap of sympathizing with the oppressed—the

speaking for the farmers and their interests—thereby reproducing a

hierarchy between the theorizing and agitating intellectual and the

farmer as supposed revolutionary subject. Nonetheless, Miyazaki’s

rhetoric strategy was not to position himself as the spokesperson for

the farmers but to argue that only farmers themselves, through farm life

itself, could achieve full liberation. Indeed, it underscores an

insistence on agency and self-sustaining practice—the organization of

cooperatist communalist farming villages—as opposed to theorizing

revolutionary action. The Nōson Seinen Sha’s revolutionary conception of

cooperatist communalism thus corresponds directly to what Murray

Bookchin argued several decades later: ‘[O]ur decision to create a

better society, and our choice of the way to do it, must come from

within ourselves, without the aid of a deity, still less a mystical

“force of nature” or a charismatic leader.’[64]

The notion of leaderless and allegedly untainted or pure anarchism in

farming village communes continued to characterize the Nōson Seinen

Sha’s theory and practice. In a less dramatic manner, one might

comprehend the anarchists’ understanding of purity as a matter of

consequence. Their idea of organized farming villages as the basis for

social revolution aimed at avoiding the creation of any avenues for the

(re-)emergence of hierarchies after liberation has been achieved. In a

pamphlet titled ‘The Organisation of the Recent Movement and a Proposal

on the Form it should Take’, published collectively in 1931 under the

pseudonym ‘Association for Bread and Liberty’ (Pan to Jiyūsha), the

Nōson Seinen Sha emphasized this point. The group promoted a clear break

with syndicalism and promised to continue to sharply criticize any other

‘impurities’ (fujunbutsu) in the anarchist and socialist movement. In

order to convince readers that they were ‘on the straight way to

anarchist revolution’, the Nōson Seinen Sha argued that it would be

imperative to clarify the form and organization the anarchist movement

should take.[65]

Unsurprisingly, the Nōson Seinen Sha envisioned a movement free of any

form of centralized organization and emphasized autonomous action and

decentralization as the only meaningful tactics. According to its

critique, it had been an error of the previous mass-oriented anarchist

and labour movement to establish permanent groups for education, labour,

propaganda, and so on. Their criticism targeted, in particular,

nationwide anarchist organizations such as the Kokushoku Seinen Reimen

(shortened to Kokuren), which had emerged from December 1925 out of

various militant groups and identified itself as an avant-garde minority

struggling for class liberation.[66] Taking the example of the

propaganda leaflets of anarchist groups that operated nationwide, the

Nōson Seinen Sha complained about the almost endless meetings and

arduous decision-making processes that were necessary to determine who

would eventually write, proofread, print, and distribute a statement or

leaflet. Such long processes were ineffective and, moreover, made the

movement vulnerable, because reliance on an unchanging organizational

structure made it easier for the authorities to persecute and eventually

paralyse the movement.[67]

In contrast, the Nōson Seinen Sha envisioned only occasional,

task-oriented groups. One of its catchphrases was ‘gather when

necessary, dissolve when finished’. This became a motto to articulate

the temporary nature of the grouping together of individuals who shared

interests to achieve a particular goal. In vainglorious terms, the Nōson

Seinen Sha even claimed that, ‘This is where for the first time the

possibility of a true anarchist revolution is born.’[68] The strategy of

organizing the masses to rise up to achieve an anarchist revolution,

either through intensive propaganda or planned and/or spontaneous

uprisings, would have been unsuccessful under the prevailing

circumstances. Such actions would even cause harm to the movement,

because it would have made it easy for state authorities to intervene,

win the struggle due to the imperial state’s superior force, and

reaffirm its authority. Even more importantly, the development of

individual freedom was at stake. Instead of a centralized mass

organization, the meeting up of individuals would allow them to

articulate their personal needs and desires independently. Ultimately,

the Nōson Seinen Sha argued, such individual-based contact and

association around a single issue and repeatedly confronting the

individual with a ‘new worldview’ (atarashii sekaikan) would create a

dynamic from which a ‘new human’ (shinjin) —an anarchist—would emerge

who bore the potential for full liberation. Its call to immediate action

was: ‘Refuse bottom-up as well as from periphery to the centre! From

formation to decentralisation! Autonomous, decentralised action rather

than centralisation!’[69]

The Nōson Seinen Sha’s strong rhetoric criticizing the contemporary

anarchist movement and theorizing the necessary steps for a successful

anarchist revolution was not free of contradictions. As John Crump has

stressed, contemporary anarchists, including Hatta Shuzō (1886–1934),

pointed out that regarding organization there would be some

inconsistencies between the group’s theory and practice. Despite the

call for equality between anarchists and common farmers, those Nōson

Seinen Sha members still living in urban centres believed in the group’s

avant-garde, revolutionary force. Hatta heavily criticized the Nōson

Seinen Sha for pretending to claim to have no leadership while

simultaneously setting themselves up as providing guidance to the

masses.[70] Despite the validity of such criticism, the Nōson Seinen

Sha’s anarchist theory of action was nevertheless remarkable. It might

appear as just a simple, nativist, retrogressive dream of retreating

from industrial urbanization to a seemingly untainted natural

environment. Yet the group’s degree of awareness of the forces of

capitalism and its strategies to undermine them are distinctive and

highly progressive. In particular, the emphasis on a self-sufficient

farming life in which free individuals were connected by mutual aid and

were organized temporarily in task-oriented associations becomes even

more effective by connecting such a life with a refusal to pay taxes in

order to shatter the existential basis of the imperial state. Moreover,

Nōson Seinen Sha’s anarchism was embedded into a perspicacious framework

promoting a ‘new worldview’, indicating the group’s globally conscious

vision for liberation. Such global appeal becomes particularly apparent

through its emphasis on creating the ‘new human’, which discursively

connected Japanese anarchists to the endeavour of social movements

worldwide. Similar poetics of the ‘new human’ synchronously emerged in

movements and places as different as Weimar Republican Lebensreform,

Soviet physical culture, and Mohandas Gandhi’s bodily exercises.[71]

Hence, as the following section will demonstrate, Japanese anarchists

from the Nōson Seinen Sha were exceedingly modern in and through their

globally conscious trans-imperial anarchism.

Anarchism across empires: the Nōson Seinen Sha’s critique and

appropriations

Trans-imperial connections—physical manoeuvring and intellectual

journeying within and beyond imperial boundaries—were characteristic of

Japanese anarchists. The contact, collision, and conjunction of

revolutionary theory and practice worldwide was pivotal for developing

its ideas and sharpening its arguments. In particular, appreciation

of—and equally important—demarcation from socialist thought and

revolutionary experience the world over was crucial to the Nōson Seinen

Sha’s identity politics in terms of establishing its distinct yet

universalist cooperatist communalism. There is not one singular source

or movement that can be determined as the origin of its anarchism.

Rather, a multiplicity of influences shaped the group’s anarchist theory

and practice.

The Russian Revolution and subsequent Bolshevik rule became a major

point of reference for revolutionary thought worldwide—it allowed

‘utopian daydreaming’, to quote Neil McInnes’s disparaging remark, and

had a decisive but also divisive impact on socialist/communist

movements.[72] Japanese anarchists were well aware of Bolshevism’s

revolutionary force in transforming society and acknowledged its vision

of necessary fundamental social change. They even agreed with the idea

of ‘creative violence’ (sōzōteki bōryoku) as a destructive force that

would shatter the existing social, economic, political, and cultural

order and would be imperative to achieving full liberation in a newly

built social organization. Yet members of the Nōson Seinen Sha, like

many other leftist revolutionary theorists and activists in Japan and

elsewhere,[73] had reservations about Bolshevism’s methods and heavily

objected to it for various reasons. The group criticized centralized

party building as well as the submission of the individual to the will

of the party, labelling it as an avant-garde revolutionary force and

constraint collectivization. In bold language, Miyazaki called attention

to the Bolsheviks’ foreseeable oppression: ‘To achieve their high

ambitions they will exploit the people.’ In order to illustrate

Bolsheviks’ true and bad intentions, Miyazaki compared its intervention

with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Japanese feudalist regimes under

Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa rule. Feudal lords would also have

claimed to aim for the ‘transformation of society’ (shakai no henkaku);

however, ‘from the position of the people [minshū], common people’s life

was still not liberated’. Miyazaki agreed with the Bolsheviks that with

‘today’s landowning capitalists’ government … there is [a] need to take

the political power of the established ruling class in the people’s own

hands by force’. Yet, he asserted that ‘the people betrayed by the

government … are certainly as easily betrayed by the Bolsheviks’.

Miyazaki was convinced that the Bolsheviks misunderstood the fundamental

principles of successful revolutionary transformation and that this was

thus a sign of Bolshevism’s anti-revolutionary, backward, even

reactionary methods. This would be particularly visible from the

perspective of the farming village. ‘By the time when the Bolsheviks

have seized power in a red government (sekishoku seifu) based in the

city, the Bolshevik functionary comes to the village with commands for

the peasants, the first one being “requisition of harvest”. Without any

reason they go and rob the peasants’ products.’[74] Any resistance to

such orders would be severely punished, and Miyazaki underscored this by

reminding his readers of the Great Kantō Earthquake in 1923 as well as

the March 15 Incident from 1928, and how dissidents were persecuted,

arrested, and assassinated by government officials in the wake of these

events. Thus, Miyazaki urged ‘the dear farmers’ to understand that

socialist transformation and five-years plans were no less than ‘dirty

deception’ (fuketsuna giman) that would not lead to their

liberation.[75]

Nōson Seinen Sha’s radical critique not only targeted Bolshevism, it

also attacked anarchist and socialist movements and their advocates

worldwide. In his History of the Japanese Anarchist Movement from 1932,

Suzuki Yasuyuki discussed at length the weaknesses and pitfalls of

previous socialist theory and practice, including the European tradition

of anarchism. In particular, he heavily criticized Mikhail Bakunin and

his plea for a ‘bottom-up’ (shita kara ue e) approach as ‘destructive

destruction’ (hakai tekina hakai). On the contrary, Suzuki put the case

for the Nōson Seinen Sha’s ‘practical anarchism’ (jissen tekina

museifushugi) and its ‘constructive destruction’ (kensetsu tekina

hakai). He also emphasized that the group’s most important shift in

terms of anarchist theory and practice would not offer liberation to the

farmers (nōson no naka e), but instead a non-hierarchical,

decentralized, temporal, and task-oriented organization from within

their midst (nōson no naka kara). This could be accomplished through the

immediate implementation of an egalitarian system of production and

consumption organized in cooperative farming villages.[76]

By discussing and criticizing the goals and failures of socialist and

anarchist movements in Russia, France, Germany, and Spain, Suzuki

integrated Japanese anarchism into a worldwide struggle for liberation.

He could not base his arguments on Nōson Seinen Sha’s achievements or

popularity among the masses. Rather, in contrast to what he called the

‘emotional’, and therefore foredoomed, efforts in the West, Suzuki

underscored the group’s rationality. He insisted that it would be an

enlightened (keimō tekina), science-based movement, and that its theory

and practice would ultimately lead to revolution.[77] Suzuki’s reasoning

was grounded in a fundamental understanding of social organization as

social organism. This global idea was widespread and appeared alongside

competing and conflicting political positions and scientific approaches.

Anarchists like George Barrett, whose Anarchist Revolution Suzuki had

translated in 1930, as well as, among many others, socialist and social

hygienist Auguste Forel in Switzerland, sociologist Émile Durkheim in

France, evolutionist Herbert Spencer in England, and the Nazi vision of

the Volkskörper fostered an understanding of society as a complex social

organism that forms a whole through the functionality of all its social

parts and being.[78] Such a shared understanding underscores the Nōson

Seinen Sha’s progressive position globally. Yet Suzuki and Miyazaki did

not dwell only on the group’s rationality and modernity woven into its

narrative of anarchist theory and practice, they departed from other

notions of social organism in crucial ways. They emphasized that human

agency was not limited to its functionality for the whole social body,

but was an individual freedom to choose and experience labour and

association in a liberated society, based on the idea of mutual aid.

Suzuki did not dismiss all Western science. On the contrary, he provided

an anarchist reading of history, anthropology, and evolutionary theory

with reference to Peter Kropotkin as well as Élisée Reclus, an anarchist

geographer whose thought had a strong impact on the development of

eco-anarchism. He demonstrated the pivotal and universal significance of

mutuality for social organization and human existence. Suzuki thought of

contemporary capitalist society as being ‘in the middle of serious

unrest’ and claimed that people blinded by Darwinist evolutionary

theory, and who embraced life as a form of competition, would intensify

the world’s crisis. He rejected Marxism, because it would not offer any

solution due to its narrow focus on the connections between human beings

determined by capitalism and the struggle for the means of production.

More important, according to Suzuki, was the emphasis on mutuality or

mutual aid—not competition or struggle—as a historical force for

liberation. Studies on the life of monkeys and prehistoric human

activity had proven, he argued, that conflict and struggle in society

had emerged alongside the development of inequality and hierarchy caused

by the organization of clans and classes. Following Élisée Reclus,

Suzuki thus promoted another take on world history in terms of universal

harmony and social equality:

It is deeply moving to carefully observe the entire landscape of the

earth, its nature of infinite variety and the effect of human

activities’ eternal force causing its harmony […]. Yet, the very same

earth—sustaining and furthermore providing for humankind—and

heaven—illuminating the world and supplying the universe’s

energy—together with a matrix of human beings in harmoniously vibrating

conditions can be seen and sensed.[79]

Dismissing Suzuki’s claims as mere naive, idealist belief in a better

world that had supposedly existed in ancient times and which might be

envisioned in the far future does not do justice to his grounding in

scientific reasoning. Suzuki’s line of argument was very close to the

observations that Japanese anarchists had articulated a decade before.

For instance, in the 1920s Ishikawa Sanshirō had called for a similar

cosmological approach, labelled ‘unity in multiplicity’, arguing, in Sho

Konishi’s words, for ‘the infinity that characterised the centreless

universe’, which dictates ‘the absence of an absolute subject of power

and the limitlessness of possibilities for human interaction and

cultural invention’.[80] Humankind would need to overcome hierarchy and

competition, Suzuki insisted, so as to progress towards harmonious and

free social organization. Suzuki and the Nōson Seinen Sha were convinced

that cooperatist communalism, existing in anarchist communes that

facilitated mutual aid, would be a necessary first step towards

achieving a constant cosmological dynamic that would prevent the

establishment of hierarchies and competition.

Despite Suzuki Yasuyuki’s critique of Western socialist and anarchist

theory and practice, his narrative strategy of citing Western references

appeared to him to be the only way to gain legitimacy. Despite his

strong efforts to distance himself, his writings reveal an underlying

continuity with a Western epistemological matrix, in which European

thought appears as the only point of reference to give authority to any

kind of progressive, rational thinking. Suzuki’s critique thus seems to

have been trapped in the dilemma articulated by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who

has argued that while the terms and concepts from the European tradition

are inadequate, they are nevertheless indispensable for evaluating

non-Western phenomena in order to them to be recognized.[81] It is

remarkable that Suzuki pointed out basic misunderstandings of social

mechanisms and revolutionary practice inherent in movements such as

Bolshevism. In doing so, he underscored the emotional character of

Western socialist and anarchist movements, and disparaged its

revolutionary romanticisms as the main reason for the failure of social

revolutions. In contrast, Suzuki emphasized the Nōson Seinen Sha’s

rationality and progressiveness. It is his insistence on universality

and scientifically certified forces of human existence, agency, and

creativity—such as mutual aid in evolutionary theory—that undermined the

West’s claim for rationality. Yet his reproduction of Western epistemic

hegemony gave authority to Suzuki’s logic, rendering cooperatist

communalism as a globally conscious and modern approach to social

innovation and, ultimately, liberation.

An attempt to decentre social revolution from following a Eurocentric

script is also apparent in the Nōson Seinen Sha’s engagement with

non-Western revolutionary theory and practice. Contemporary Asian

movements sparked interest for obvious reasons, one being their spatial

proximity to the orbit of the Japanese empire. Nevertheless, Japanese

anarchists could have just ignored other Asian movements and only looked

at the struggles of European, American, and Russian comrades. Miyazaki,

on the contrary, compared the Nōson Seinen Sha’s concepts with, for

example, those of the anti-colonial struggle in India. In particular,

Gandhi’s campaign of non-cooperation, translated by Miyazaki as muteikō

shugi and which he even referred to as ‘Gandhism’ (ganjīzumu), was of

interest to Japanese anarchists. The non-cooperation campaign was part

of Gandhi’s larger concept of non-violent resistance (satyagraha) in the

Indian independence movement. Miyazaki argued that non-cooperation as

conceptualized by Gandhi would have both an economic and a political

dimension. The boycott of British goods and the sole consumption of

Indian products instead would indeed undermine the colonial

administration and help stop the generation of revenue for the British

government. He particularly praised Gandhi’s understanding of autarky to

gain independence. Yet, Miyazaki believed that ‘Gandhism is incomplete’

because its focus on changing the economy and the political system would

not change the social organization in which they were rooted. India’s

independence from British colonial rule might result in a new economy

and reformed political system, but without radical change, Miyazaki

argued, the bourgeoisie would continue to dominate a hierarchical

society that would not liberate the people.[82]

The Nōson Seinen Sha also discussed other revolutionary peasant

uprisings in Asia. It addressed incidents and movements in Northeast

Asia and British Burma, and evaluated their sustainability and

radicalism. However, it did not judge radicalism by the degree of

violence in the uprisings, which the Nōson Seinen Sha did not reject per

se. For example, it did not condemn the Wanpaoshan Incident of 1 July

1931 (which involved a clash between Korean and Chinese farmers and

resulted in outbursts of anti-Chinese violence all over colonial Korea)

for its obvious racism and unnecessary ruthlessness. Rather, it argued

that the uprising failed because it could not be turned into a

‘revolutionary rebellion’ (kakumeitekina bōdō). By contrast, the group

praised a series of peasant uprisings in British Burma that later became

known as the Saya San Rebellion (1930–1932). Most historiography has

highlighted the Burmese peasants’ backwardness, prematurity, and lack of

organization in similar insurrections, reflecting Marx’s distrust of the

peasantry, who were regarded as reactionary, showing no solidarity with

workers, and having no class consciousness. Many local contemporary

socialists and communists in East and Southeast Asia also expressed

anti-peasantry feeling, stereotyping farmers as superstitious, too

respectful of hierarchy, tradition-bound and therefore fearful of

(revolutionary) change.[83] The Nōson Seinen Sha, however, celebrated

Burmese peasants’ traits and characteristics:

The recent peasant rebellion spreading in British Burma possesses no

centred organisational body [chūshin tekina soshikitai] of any kind.

This is peasants’ fashion whose autonomous action has no concentrated

structure. […] If the Burma peasants had clung to centralised

organisation [shūchū soshiki] and if there had been no autonomy pervaded

spirit, the peasants would have instantly been repressed.[84]

In contrast to Marxist doctrine, that of the Nōson Seinen Sha defended

the peasantry for their revolutionary practice and, moreover, even

underscored their radicalism as revolutionary subjects. Peasant

rebellions, it argued, are autonomous, and farmers’ self-organization

and self-sufficiency made them independent from established imperial

bourgeois society and economy. These circumstances would foster the

potential to change the system at its roots.

At first glance, it is striking that all of the Nōson Seinen Sha’s

commentaries never raised the issue of race. The absence of any mention

of race and racism in its analysis of events in colonial constellations

such as the Gandhi-lead independence movement in colonial India and the

peasant rebellion in British Burma is particularly conspicuous. It is

especially noteworthy because the British empire’s colonial

administrations are especially known for their race-conscious ‘rule of

colonial difference’.[85] Racial taxonomies, hierarchies, and tensions

were also significant in Japan’s empire-building, as the Wanpaoshan

Incident and its aftermath demonstrate.[86] Being positioned outside the

racial and epistemological privileged West, Japanese anarchists could

have supported their aim for liberation with anti-racist arguments. Of

course, members of the Nōson Seinen Sha might just have been too

ignorant or preoccupied to acknowledge racialized hierarchy and power.

Its idea of liberation seems to have been too practical, yet also too

universalist and abstract, so that perhaps it just could not see any

need to recognize the issue. In particular, its idea of the ‘new human’

was a distraction from the fact that skin colour as a signifier of power

matters. As the Nōson Seinen Sha unambiguously argued: ‘Our

understanding is to breathe a new Weltanschauung [sekaikan] into the new

human as quickly as possible. The new human as anarchist will initiate

independent autonomous action by determining his own needs and demands

(yūkyū).’[87] Following the logic of Japanese anarchists, its ultimate

goal of liberation and equality appears to have allowed no petty

differentiation; hierarchies of race, it apparently believed, would

dissolve after the new human understood and brought about humanity’s

true and pure nature of autonomy and liberty.

Conclusion

Newspapers and the police alike imagined the Nōson Seinen Sha to be a

force that undermined the empire and state authority. The mass media,

however, mainly paid attention to the group in 1937, after the police

had arrested some of its members between 1934 and 1936, long after its

commune project had ended. Some of the arrests occurred in the wake of

preparations for a military manoeuvre in Nagano’s neighbouring

prefecture of Gunma, which emperor Hirohito was meant to attend, and

were therefore part of clearing the area of potential threats by the

police.[88] Even in retrospect, they presented the group’s network as a

kraken whose tentacles had apparently reached into every part of the

Japanese empire, from Karafuto to Korea, Taiwan and Shanghai, and of

course inside mainland Japan.[89] Just one day later, Korean newspapers

also reported the arrest of members of the group, showing that the news

had spread throughout the Japanese empire.[90] In their reports the

police classified the Nōson Seinen Sha as a secret society (himitsu

kessha) and stressed that its alleged hidden activities were undermining

the imperial state. They even called attention to what they called

‘Nōson Seinen Sha-izumu’, a phrase in which -izumu (-ism) completely

overrated the group’s potential threat. The police’s labelling gave the

group a sneaky, dangerous, and foreign appeal, compounded by borrowing

an ending from a foreign language instead of the Japanese character

compound shugi. Moreover, the police emphasized the Nōson Seinen Sha’s

adaption of foreign anarchist thought, mainly from Russian thinkers.[91]

As Umemori Naoyuki has stressed in the context of the persecution of

anarchists in the High Treason Incident in 1910, such a discursive

construction of a supposed anarchist threat as coming from outside the

Japanese community echoed the imperial state’s symbolic crackdown of its

internal enemies. The state’s intervention in highlighting anarchists’

supposed foreignness distinguished between included and excluded

imperial subjects, and was subsequently aimed at fostering imperial

Japan’s community.[92]

The emphasis on foreignness in the media and the authorities’

representation of the Nōson Seinen Sha, however, also demonstrates the

connectedness of its anarchist theory and practice beyond imperial Japan

and accentuates its trans-imperial anarchism. Indeed, the Nōson Seinen

Sha and other movements’ propagation and building of radical utopian

communities should be understood as part of a global, synchronic

phenomenon. As has been demonstrated, Suzuki’s reference to Western

anarchist thought and practice is proof of a trans-imperial flow of

knowledge, and his globally conscious critique at least indicates that

non-Western anarchists were not passive recipients of such knowledge,

but actively contributed to its appropriation. As Alf Lüdtke has argued,

appropriation—in accordance with the German term Aneignung—always

entails rupture, change, and challenge, and therefore does not mean

unilateral dissemination.[93] Moreover, a decentralized, and especially

a non-Eurocentric, acknowledgement of non-Western revolutionary theory

and practice allows the recognition of historical variety beyond Western

master narratives of political struggle. For instance, Japan itself is

still not known for a history of dissent, despite the existence of many

radical activists and groups. Looking at the Nōson Seinen Sha’s writings

which address liberation struggles in various places and which are

usually ignored in contemporary European thought and activism, opens

further perspectives on anarchism and other forms of radicalism in

numerous parts in the world. Of course, Russia is most important, given

the high impact of Russian anarchist thought on Japanese intellectuals

in the first half of the twentieth century. But Nōson Seinen Sha’s

analysis of Gandhism in India and revolutionary peasant movements in

colonial Burma also underscores global entanglements, at least in the

awareness of anarchist activists.

A close reading of imperial Japan’s anarchists’ text and paying

attention to their cooperatist communalism offer insights that allow

scholarly and political intervention, as does highlighting such silenced

histories, with the aim of integrating them into broader

conversation—hopefully on historical actors’ own terms. The key

characteristics of imperial Japan’s anarchism, it appears, were its

pragmatism, practicality, and universality—building anarchist

self-sufficient farming communes that would simultaneously undermine

state authority and ensure the survival of the movements’ practitioners.

For the Nōson Seinen Sha, cooperatist communalism was therefore a

practical solution for revolutionary practice, which, for some members

of the anarchist movement, might appear as much less heroic and

idealistic than bombing the infrastructure or organizing the general

strike to initiate revolution. Self-sufficient life and farming villages

guided by mutual aid obviously does not overthrow the system overnight.

It nevertheless undermines it radically by refusing the payment of

taxes, dodging state repression, and living according to one’s own

needs. Anarchists’ cooperatist communalism thus should not be dismissed

as a mere naive, idealistic dream, but rather acknowledged as a very

likely and thus practical solution in everyday life. Ultimately, despite

its local and pragmatic focus, the Nōson Seinen Sha actually articulated

universalist claims of liberation. Such universal practicality helped

Japanese anarchists to position themselves against Japan’s imperial

state power as much as against Eurocentric hegemony, and their

trans-imperial anarchism demonstrates anarchists’ global vision in

guiding revolutionary theory and practice.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Cyrian Pitteloud, Pascale Siegrist, Narita Keisuke, Sho

Konishi, Shakhar Rahav, Umemori Naoyuki, Carl Levy, Harriet Hulme, and

the anonymous reviewers of Modern Asian Studies for their insightful

comments which helped tremendously to improve this article.

[1] Anderson, Benedict, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the

Anti-Colonial Imagination (New York: Verso, 2007), p. 2.

[2] A prominent case study for Southeast Asia and beyond is Scott, James

C., The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland

Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).

[3] Ramnath, Maia, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global

Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2011); and Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham, The

Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

[4] van der Walt, Lucien and Hirsch, Steven J., ‘Rethinking Anarchism

and Syndicalism: The Colonial and Post-colonial Experience, 1870–1940’,

in Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World,

1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and

Social Revolution, (eds) Hirsch, Steven J. and Walt, Lucien van der

(Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. li.

[5] The historical and thematic variety of anarchism in theory and

practice globally is also vividly illustrated in: Levy, Carl and Adams,

Matthew S. (eds), The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism (London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2019).

[6] On Kōtoku and Ōsugi, respectively, see: Tierney, Robert Thomas,

Monster of the Twentieth Century: Kōtoku Shūsui and Japan’s First

Anti-Imperialist Movement (Oakland: University of California Press,

2015); and Umemori, Naoyuki, Shoki shakai shugi no chikeigaku: Ōsugi

Sakae to sono jidai (Tokyo: Yūshisha, 2016).

[7] See, among others, Large, Stephen S., ‘The Romance of Revolution in

Japanese Anarchism and Communism during the Taishō Period’, Modern Asian

Studies, vol. 11, no. 3, 1977, pp. 441–467; Notehelfer, Fred G., Kōtoku

Shūsui: Portrait of a Japanese Radical (London and New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1971); Matsuda, Michio, Anakizumu: Henshū, kaisetsu,

Gendai nihon shisō taike 16 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1963), pp. 36–42;

Stanley, Thomas A., Ōsugi Sakae: Anarchist in Taishō Japan. The

Creativity of the Ego (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982),

pp. 59–63; Hoston, Germaine A., The State, Identity, and the National

Question in China and Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1994), p. 127.

[8] Willems, Nadine, ‘Transnational Anarchism, Japanese Revolutionary

Connections, and the Personal Politics of Exile’, The Historical

Journal, vol. 61, no. 3, 2018, pp. 719–741, p. 721]

[9] Hwang, Dongyoun, Anarchism in Korea: Independence, Transnationalism,

and the Question of National Development 1919–1984 (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2016); Karl, Rebecca, Staging the World:

Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham and

London: Duke University Press, 2002); Dirlik, Arif, Anarchism in the

Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and

Zarrow, Peter, Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1990).

[10] Turcato, Davide, ‘Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement,

1885–1915’, International Review of Social History, vol. 52, no. 3,

2007, pp. 404–444, pp. 412 and 415; Kawashima, Ken C., The Proletarian

Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (Durham and London: Duke

University Press, 2009).

[11] Hedinger, Daniel and Heé, Nadin, ‘Trans-Imperial

History—Connectivity, Cooperation and Competition’, Journal of Modern

European History, vol. 16, no. 4, 2018, pp. 429–452.

[12] Hofmann, Reto, ‘The Fascist New-Old Order’, Journal of Global

History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2017, pp. 166–183, pp. 172–173; see also the

special issue’s editorial: Hedinger, Daniel and Hofmann, Reto, ‘Axis

Empires: Towards a Global History of Fascist Imperialism’, Journal of

Global History, vol. 12, no. 2, 2017, pp. 161–165; and Harootunian,

Harry D., Marx after Marx: History and Time in the Expansion of

Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

[13] Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick, Empires in World History:

Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2010), pp. 3–4.

[14] Heé, Nadin, Imperiales Wissen und koloniale Gewalt: Japans

Herrschaft in Taiwan 1895–1945 (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 2012), p. 30;

Saaler, Sven, ‘Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Overcoming the

Nation, Creating a Region, Forging an Empire’, in Pan-Asianism in Modern

Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders, (eds) Saaler,

Sven and Koschmann, Victor (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 1–18.

[15] For a thorough discussion—and critique—of anarchism’s alleged lack

of complexity, see: Jun, Nathan, Anarchism and Political Modernity (New

York: Continuum Books, 2012).

[16] Farmers, believed to be the main revolutionary subjects, were the

main targets of the group’s agitation.

[17] Conrad, Sebastian and Sachsenmaier, Dominik (eds), Competing

Visions of World Order: Global Moments and Movements, 1880s–1930s (New

York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 14.

[18] On the different, yet similar, communal projects the world over,

see: Morris-Suzuki, Tessa, ‘Beyond Utopia: New Villages and Living

Politics in Modern Japan and across Frontiers’, History Workshop

Journal, vol. 85, 2018, pp. 47–71; Rahav, Shakhar, ‘How shall we Live?:

Chinese Communal Experiments after the Great War in Global Context’,

Journal of World History, vol. 26, no. 3, 2016, pp. 521–548; Taylor,

Antony, ‘“Septic Edens”: Surveillance, Eroticized Anarchy and “Depraved

Communities” in Britain and the Wider World, 1890–1930’, in Global

Anti-Vice Activism: Fighting Drinks, Drugs and ‘Immorality’, 1890–1950,

(eds) Pliley, Jessica R., Kramm, Robert and Fischer-Tiné, Harald

(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 53–73;

and Sargeant, Lyman Tower, Utopianism: A Very Short Introduction

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[19] This larger argument of anarchist knowledge production and

circulation, particularly through translations, is based on Konishi,

Sho, Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual

Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,

2013).

[20] Crump, John, Hatta Shūzō and Pure Anarchism in Interwar Japan (New

York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 32.

[21] An overview of Japan’s anarchist movement and the waves of state

repression against its proponents is provided by Komatsu, Ryūji, Nihon

anakizumu undōshi (Tokyo: Aoki shinsho, 1972).

[22] Asaba, Michiaki, Anākizumu: Meicho deta dor nihon shisō nyūmon

(Tokyo: Chikuma Shinsho, 2004), pp. 61–62.

[23] Hélène Raddeker has integrated anarchist terrorism, with its fatal

and tragic moments, in a longer tradition of twentieth-century Japanese

radicalism that often evolved around themes of vengeance and martyrdom.

Raddeker, Hélène Bowen, Treacherous Women of Imperial Japan. Patriarchal

Fictions, Patricidal Fantasies (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 131.

[24] Hagiwara, Shintarō, Nihon anakizumu rōdō undōshi (Tokyo: Gendai

Shichosha, 1969).

[25] Crump, Hatta Shūzō, p. 33.

[26] Ibid., pp. 101–103.

[27] Nishiyama, Taku, Ishikawa Sanshirō no yūtopia: Shakai shisō to

jissen (Tokyo: Tōjishobō, 2007).

[28] Bookchin, Murray, Social Ecology and Communalism (Oakland, CA: AK

Press, 2006), pp. 89–99.

[29] Ibid., p. 80.

[30] sha, Nōson seinen, ‘Saikin undō no soshiki narabi ni keitai nit

suite no ichi teian’, in 1930 nendai ni okeru nihon anakizumu kakumei

undo: Shiryō nōson seinen sha undoshi, (ed.) Nōson seinen sha undoshi

kankōkai (Tokyo: Unita shoho, 1972 [1931]), p. 130.

[31] Crump, Hatta Shūzō, p. 179.

[32] The term ‘imperial democracy’ is borrowed from Gordon, Andrew,

Labor and Imperial Democracy in Prewar Japan (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1991).

[33] Hosaka, Masayasu, Nōson seinen sha jiken: Shōwa anakisuto no mita

maboroshi (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2011); Mihara, Yōko, ‘Nōson Seinen Sha

to Gendai’, in Nōson Seinen Sha Sono Shiso to Tatakai, (ed.) Kenkyūkai,

Hiroshima Museifushugi (Hiroshima: Hiroshima Museifushugi Kenkyūkai,

1988); and Crump, John, The Anarchist Movement in Japan (London: ACF,

1996), respectively, offer very rare contextualization of the Nōson

Seinen Sha within the Japanese anarchist movement.

[34] Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, p. 127.

[35] Crump, The Anarchist Movement in Japan, p. 11. Gavin, Masako and

Middleton, Ben (eds), Japan and the High Treason Incident (New York:

Routledge, 2013).

[36] For an overview of Japan’s rural history at the end of the

nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth centuries, see Waswo,

Ann, ‘The Transformation of Rural Society, 1900–1950’, in The Cambridge

History of Japan, Vol. 6, (ed.) Duus, Peter (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1988), pp. 541–605.

[37] Havens, Thomas R. H., Farm and Nation in Modern Japan: Agrarian

Nationalism, 1870–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1974), pp. 151–152.

[38] Francks, Penelope, Rural Economic Development in Japan: From the

Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War (New York: Routledge, 2006), pp.

193–218.

[39] Manchuria also promised to be a place of opportunity for imperial

Japan’s dissidents. Young, Louise, Japan’s Total Empire: Manchuria and

the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1999).

[40] Tipton, Elise K., Modern Japan: A Social and Political History (New

York: Routledge, 2002), p. 111.

[41] Harootunian, Harry D., Overcome by Modernity: History, Culture and

Community in Interwar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2000).

[42] Akaba, Hajime, ‘Nōmin no fukuin’, Kyōgaku panfuretto, vol. 6, 1929

[1910], pp. 18–19. This issue, however, was censored and republished in,

among others, Meiji Bunka Shiryō Sōsho, Vol. 5 (Tokyo: Kazama, 1960),

pp. 287–304.

[43] Konishi, Sho, ‘Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time: Arishima

Cooperative Farm in Hokkaido, 1922–1935’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 47,

no. 6, 2013, pp. 1845–1887, p. 1846.

[44] Tipton, Modern Japan, p. 115.

[45] Havens, Farm and Nation in Modern Japan, p. 8.

[46] Harootunian, Overcome by Modernity, p. 28.

[47] Vlastos, Stephen, ‘Agrarianism without Tradition: The Radical

Critique of Prewar Japanese Modernity’, in Mirror of Modernity: Invented

Traditions of Modern Japan, (ed.) Vlastos, Stephen (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 1996), pp. 83–93.

[48] Crump, The Anarchist Movement in Japan, pp. 121 and 146.

[49] Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, Chapter 6.

[50] Stolz, Robert, ‘So You’ve Converged—Now What? The Convergence of

Critique’, Japanese Studies, vol. 34, no. 3, 2014, pp. 307–323, p. 317.

[51] Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, p. 339.

[52] Hosaka, Nōson seinen sha jiken, p. 86.

[53] Konishi, ‘Ordinary Farmers Living Anarchist Time’, p. 1846.

[54] Miyazaki, Akira, ‘Nōmin ni yobu’, in Nōson Seinen Sha Shiryō:

Shakai Mondai Shiryō Sōsho 1/12, (ed.) Kenkyūkai, Shakai Mondai Shiryō

(Kyoto: Yutaka, 1972 [1930]), p. 511.

[55] Ibid., p. 527.

[56] For an analysis of rice in modern Japanese history, refer to

Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko, Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

[57] Barrett, George, Anarchist Revolution (London: Freedom Press, 1920,

2^(nd) edn [1912]), p. 13.

[58] Miyazaki, ‘Nōmin ni yobu’, p. 518.

[59] Ibid., p. 526.

[60] Ibid., p. 523.

[61] Ibid., p. 525.

[62] Ibid., pp. 527–528.

[63] Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Marxism

and the Interpretation of Culture, (eds) Nelson, Cary and Grossberg,

Lawrence (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp.

271–313.

[64] Bookchin, Social Ecology and Communalism, p. 79.

[65] Nōson Seinen Sha, ‘Saikin undō no soshiki narabi ni keitai nit

suite no ichi teian’, p. 125.

[66] Crump, The Anarchist Movement in Japan, pp. 69–71.

[67] Nōson Seinen Sha, ‘Saikin undō no soshiki narabi ni keitai nit

suite no ichi teian’, p. 125.

[68] Ibid., p. 128.

[69] Ibid., pp. 128 and 130.

[70] Crump, Hatta Shūzō, p. 177.

[71] For comparative purposes, see, among others, Wedemeyer-Kolwe,

Bernd, ‘Der neue Mensch’: Körperkultur im Kaiserreich und in der

Weimarer Republik (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004); Grant,

Susan, Physical Culture and Sport in Soviet Society: Propaganda,

Acculturation, and Transformation in the 1920s and 1930s (New York:

Routledge, 2013); Alter, Joseph S., ‘Gandhi’s Body, Gandhi’s Truth:

Nonviolence and the Biomoral Imperative of Public Health’, Journal of

Asian Studies, vol. 55, no. 2, 1996, pp. 301–322.

[72] McInnes, Neil, ‘The Labour Movement: Socialists, Communists, Trade

Unions’, in The Impact of the Russian Revolution, 1917–1967, (ed.) Royal

Institute of International Affairs (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1967), p. 37.

[73] Russell, Bertrand, Bolshevism: Practice and Theory (New York:

Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920).

[74] Miyazaki, ‘Nōmin ni yobu’, pp. 532–533.

[75] Ibid., p. 535.

[76] Suzuki, Yasuyuki, Nihon museifushugi undōshi (Tokyo: Kokushoku

sensensha, 1990 [1932]), pp. 56–57.

[77] Ibid., p. 59.

[78] Barrett, Anarchist Revolution, p. 18; Pliley, Jessica R., Kramm,

Robert and Fischer-Tiné, Harald (eds), Global Anti-Vice Activism:

Fighting Drinks, Drugs and ‘Immorality’ (Cambridge and New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2016), p. 14; Durkheim, Émile, The Division

of Labour in Society (London: Macmillan, 1984 [1893]), p. 11; Neumann,

Boaz, ‘The Phenomenology of the German People’s Body (Volkskörper) and

the Extermination of the Jewish Body’, New German Critique, vol. 36, no.

1 (106), 2009, pp. 149–181.

[79] Suzuki, Nihon museifushugi undōshi, pp. 81–82.

[80] Konishi, Anarchist Modernity, p. 340.

[81] Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought

and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000),

p. 16.

[82] Miyazaki, ‘Nōmin ni yobu’, pp. 516–517.

[83] Christie, Clive, Ideology and Revolution in Southeast Asia,

1900–1980 (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), pp. 40–43.

[84] Nōson Seinen Sha, ‘Saikin undō no soshiki narabi ni keitai nit

suite no ichi teian’, pp. 125–126.

[85] Chatterjee, Partha, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and

Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p.

10.

[86] On race and racism in the Japanese empire, see Heé, Imperiales

Wissen und koloniale Gewalt; Fujitani, Takashi, Race for Empire: Koreans

as Japanese and Japanese as Americans during World War II (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2011).

[87] Nōson Seinen Sha, ‘Saikin undō no soshiki narabi ni keitai nit

suite no ichi teian’, p. 128.

[88] Crump, Hatta Shūzō, p. 179.

[89] ‘Nōson seinen sha no kessei’, Shinano Mainichi Shinbun, 11 January

1937.

[90] ‘Kokushoku kyosanto’, Maeil Shinbo, 12 January 1937.

[91] keisatsubu, Naganoken, ‘Himitsu kessha nōson seinen sha jiken ni

kansuru kōseki gaiyō’, in Tokkō keisatsu kankei shiryō shūsei, Vol. 20,

(ed.) Fujio, Ogino (Tokyo: Fujishuppan, 1993 [1937]), p. 268.

[92] Naoyuki Umemori, ‘The Historical Contexts of the High Treason

Incident: Governmentality and Colonialism’, in Japan and the High

Treason Incident, (eds) Gavin and Middleton, p. 63.

[93] Lüdtke, Alf, ‘Was ist und wer treibt Alltagsgeschichte?’, in

Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und

Lebenswelten, (ed.) Lüdtke, Alf (Frankfurt/M. and New York: Campus,

1989), p. 11.